Texas is suing the Justice Department to force a pre-clearance of its voter ID law, which requires government-issued photo IDs for registered voters at the polls. The Justice Department contends the legislation discriminates against minorities.

I highlight the exchange between Abudu and Williams because the senator's naïveté would be breathtaking were it not feigned — but is still indicative of the larger strategy. He was not guessing.

A week of testimony in the voter ID battle in Washington, D.C., revealed much the same questions as occurred in the recent redistricting fight. Did the state knowingly intend to disproportionately impact minority voters or did it act from race-neutral motives — the sanctity of the ballot box?

As testimony in this case revealed, the GOP Legislature, as it enacted voter ID, rejected doing the homework to determine effect, a giveaway about intent. This seems to indicate either indifference or a fear that they knew the answer.

The state even failed to demonstrate that there was any problem significant enough to warrant the legislation. The raison d'être for the legislation simply could not withstand reasonable scrutiny.

Later in his testimony, Williams said “no one will be disenfranchised.”

The state did indeed present some minor flaws in the Justice Department's expert testimony that some 1.4 million Texans, disproportionately minority, would be affected. The state's own survey that it said showed little to no effect had much too small a sampling to be credible, challengers note.

Meanwhile, duplicative names the state came up with as flaws in the Justice Department's analysis actually prove one of the challengers' points.

Testimony from J. Morgan Kousser, professor of history in social science at the California Institute of Technology, was also on point. He studied Texas voter ID bills past and present for hints that discrimination was afoot. The hints were as conspicuous as fireworks.

He noted that the bills offered from 2005 through 2011 became increasingly restrictive in ID allowed. This, he said, indicated an effort to “constrain the electorate.”

Kousser noted what anyone paying any attention in Texas has noticed — a racially polarized electorate, Republicans increasingly dependent on Anglos for support and Democrats on a faster-growing minority population.